Today we lost the beautiful European oak floorboards from downstairs. Each was torn up, then the panels and styrene were taken out to leave just the sub floor. All the nails holding the floorboards down seemed to have reacted to the water from the Thames, producing a black residue.

When you get a patent accepted by the US Patent Office Microsoft sends you a wooden plaque, faced in a sheet of brass, which has the first page of the patent application etched in it. Today I received my 30th, #8,555,192.

We’ve spent the last few days dealing with the slow approach of a swelling Thames river. Now we’re in a hotel, having evacuated ourselves this morning. I suspect by now that water will have reached our hallway, our kitchen, our living room and the rest of our ground floor. I’m glad we’re safe, warm and together, though.

Continuing my notes from the recent Research Through Design conference in Newcastle [see opening keynote]. This is the first of the sessions I attended on Day 1. Each session was held in a small room that sat about 30 people, all around a large conference table, and featured talks by 3 or 4 of the participants who had each submitted some kind of artefact to the event. Each artefact was presented, then plenty of time was left for discussion amongst the presenters and audience, not that it felt like there was a division between the two. Each session was tied thematically, with the following talks all being connected through the “Doing” of design research.

Below are my notes from day 1 of this event, featuring biological/architectural work, code, craft and paper electronics.

I’m at the very excellent Research Through Design conference up in Newcastle. Unlike many of the events I go to, this one is very focussed on the things that people design. All the speakers have had to submit an object, which they are then talking about during the sessions during the day. There have been some beautiful objects, and some great discussion.

I’m dumping my notes from the event here with very little expansion. I hope they may be useful to someone, but I suspect actually that they will be quite opaque to everyone but me. Ah well.

Day one opened with a great keynote by Rachel Wingfield from Loop.pH. She showed a LOT of cool stuff. I’ll try and cover the best of it below.

The digital version is available for free, or you can buy a printed version if you want (they’re really nicely printed, but done print-on-demand so are a little pricey – we don’t make any money from them).

This issue is a summary of the SDS “Beyond Search” theme, focussing on Sian’s “5 Web Modes”, and showcasing various projects that have come out of the work, including Seeds, Cards and our work with Aalto University on “Domesticating Search”. I’m pretty proud of this magazine series, and this is another great issue for us to give out both internally and externally, to showcase what we do.

As a reminder, there are now three issues of the magazine, on Communication, Memory and Search. All of them are available from the here.